Tag Archives: anabolic monument

If you’ve visited and walked around the northern end of the park recently, you may have noticed an interesting plant growing in the Anabolic Garden. The plants look like this:

Fava Bean Plant

Fava Bean Pod

These interesting looking plants are Fava Beans. They were planted by our friends at Farmlab who put these plants in the park because they are full of soil enriching elements, especially nitrogen. The Anabolic garden, as farmlab calls it, is a “compost monument”, meaning that the primary goal of this growth is to give the nutrients back to the soil. On Tuesday April 26th we had a huge fava bean harvest in the park. It was a fun day of fava picking and there were loads to be shared. Fava Beans, also know as “Vicia Faba” are native to African and Asia. The beans are typically eaten in Egyptian, Greek and Indian dishes, but on the 26th bags of beans were collected to be eaten in Los Angeles. They can be eaten raw after de-podding them and taking each individual shell off of each bean. It is labor intensive, but well worth the work. Here are some of our images from a fun day of harvesting with friends.

Like this:

On Friday we left you with a little goat teaser, so, here’s the lowdown. Our ungulate friends are here to help Farmlab/Metabolic Studio clear the Anabolic Monument for a new agricultural cycle.
The Anabolic Monument is the living progression of the Not a Cornfield art project consisting of a large circle of slowly decomposing cornstalk bails. The wildflowers we are enjoying right now at LASHP were first cultivated, allowed to bloom, and drop their seeds within the sculpture. The Anabolic sculpture and annual bloom of wildflowers are a unique display of the unusual partnership between Los Angeles State Historic Park and Metabolic Studio.

poppies and lupine

So the six goats, and one very strange deer/sheep hybrid, are here to help clear the way for what’s next in the Anabolic Monument. We can’t wait to see what our neighbors have in store for us.